arXiv research

The paper explores transferability of adversarial examples between convex and 01 loss models, finding non-transferability due to different decision boundaries caused by outliers.

We carefully study how well minimizing convex surrogate loss functions, corresponds to minimizing the misclassification error rate for the problem of binary classification with linear predictors. In particular, we show that amongst all convex surrogate losses, the hinge loss gives essentially the best possible bound, o…

We establish linear regret bounds for convex smooth losses using Fenchel-Young losses.

We find a convex model for traditional nonlinear regression under L2 loss.

Learning with non-modular losses is an important problem when sets of predictions are made simultaneously. The main tools for constructing convex surrogate loss functions for set prediction are margin rescaling and slack rescaling. In this work, we show that these strategies lead to tight convex surrogates iff the unde…

We study consistency properties of surrogate loss functions for general multiclass learning problems, defined by a general multiclass loss matrix. We extend the notion of classification calibration, which has been studied for binary and multiclass 0-1 classification problems (and for certain other specific learning pro…

Improved online learning for hidden-convex losses achieves optimal regret.

Empirical risk minimization frequently employs convex surrogates to underlying discrete loss functions in order to achieve computational tractability during optimization. However, classical convex surrogates can only tightly bound modular loss functions, sub-modular functions or supermodular functions separately while …

We propose in this paper a general framework for deriving loss functions for structured prediction. In our framework, the user chooses a convex set including the output space and provides an oracle for projecting onto that set. Given that oracle, our framework automatically generates a corresponding convex and smooth l…

We study losses for binary classification and class probability estimation and extend the understanding of them from margin losses to general composite losses which are the composition of a proper loss with a link function. We characterise when margin losses can be proper composite losses, explicitly show how to determ…

Unhinged loss minimization fails to improve classifier accuracy for simple data.

Develops a new theory of loss functions for statistical machine learning.

Paper improves stability analysis of SGD for various loss functions and data distributions.

This research analyzes the consistency of convex and nonconvex surrogate losses for adversarially robust classification.

We propose a robust adversarial prediction framework for general multiclass classification. Our method seeks predictive distributions that robustly optimize non-convex and non-continuous multiclass loss metrics against the worst-case conditional label distributions (the adversarial distributions) that (approximately) m…

Improved privacy-preserving methods for convex optimization with heavy-tailed data.

This paper examines the role and efficiency of the non-convex loss functions for binary classification problems. In particular, we investigate how to design a simple and effective boosting algorithm that is robust to the outliers in the data. The analysis of the role of a particular non-convex loss for prediction accur…

Optimizes exp-concave losses with a new risk bound.

Second-order methods improve differential privacy in convex optimization.

This research improves PAC-Bayesian bounds for classification tasks using convexified loss.

While optimizing convex objective (loss) functions has been a powerhouse for machine learning for at least two decades, non-convex loss functions have attracted fast growing interests recently, due to many desirable properties such as superior robustness and classification accuracy, compared with their convex counterpa…

New approach for distributed online optimization of non-convex losses with sublinear regret.

Learning with a {\it convex loss} function has been a dominating paradigm for many years. It remains an interesting question how non-convex loss functions help improve the generalization of learning with broad applicability. In this paper, we study a family of objective functions formed by truncating traditional loss f…

We analyze bias-variance of margin losses.

Proposes a generalized XGBoost method for nonconvex loss functions.

Improved COCO algorithms with better constraint control.

We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization (SCO). In this problem the goal is to approximately minimize the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex and Lipschitz loss functions. A long line of existing work on private convex optimization focuses on th…

We introduce a novel algorithm for solving learning problems where both the loss function and the regularizer are non-convex but belong to the class of difference of convex (DC) functions. Our contribution is a new general purpose proximal Newton algorithm that is able to deal with such a situation. The algorithm consi…

The Nyström method improves learning efficiency for convex losses.

Improved algorithm reduces communication rounds for distributed online learning.

New stability bounds for SGD on nonsmooth convex losses.

We consider composite loss functions for multiclass prediction comprising a proper (i.e., Fisher-consistent) loss over probability distributions and an inverse link function. We establish conditions for their (strong) convexity and explore the implications. We also show how the separation of concerns afforded by using …

A new convex loss function optimizes set predictions with balanced size and coverage.

Paper introduces a new $G^\star$ regret measure for online convex optimization with smooth losses.

Paper estimates differences in multi-attribute Gaussian graphical models using non-convex penalties.

Optimal convex loss function improves regression coefficient estimation.

In this work we develop a new algorithm for regularized empirical risk minimization. Our method extends recent techniques of Shalev-Shwartz [02/2015], which enable a dual-free analysis of SDCA, to arbitrary mini-batching schemes. Moreover, our method is able to better utilize the information in the data defining the ER…

We provide novel theoretical insights on structured prediction in the context of efficient convex surrogate loss minimization with consistency guarantees. For any task loss, we construct a convex surrogate that can be optimized via stochastic gradient descent and we prove tight bounds on the so-called "calibration func…

We address the problem of aggregating an ensemble of predictors with known loss bounds in a semi-supervised binary classification setting, to minimize prediction loss incurred on the unlabeled data. We find the minimax optimal predictions for a very general class of loss functions including all convex and many non-conv…

In this work we establish the equivalence of algorithmic regularization and explicit convex penalization for generic convex losses. We introduce a geometric condition for the optimization path of a convex function, and show that if such a condition is satisfied, the optimization path of an iterative algorithm on the un…

Proposes a new loss function for robust learning.

Improved online learning with time-varying constraints for complex domains.

New algorithms for differentially private optimization in convex and non-convex settings with near-optimal rates.

Unified stability bounds for noisy SGD across convex and non-convex losses.

We develop a variant of multiclass logistic regression that is significantly more robust to noise. The algorithm has one weight vector per class and the surrogate loss is a function of the linear activations (one per class). The surrogate loss of an example with linear activation vector $\mathbf{a}$ and class $c$ has t…

We demonstrate that almost all non-parametric dimensionality reduction methods can be expressed by a simple procedure: regularized loss minimization plus singular value truncation. By distinguishing the role of the loss and regularizer in such a process, we recover a factored perspective that reveals some gaps in the c…

In this paper, we propose a novel {\em $e$-exponentiated} transformation, $0 \le e<1$, for loss functions. When the transformation is applied to a convex loss function, the transformed loss function become more robust to outliers. Using a novel generalization error bound, we have theoretically shown that the transforme…

The paper generalizes offset Rademacher complexities to convex and non-convex problems.